Reflections from an Artist Researcher

Abstract

Wave Farm is a nonprofit organization that sponsors and preserves transmission art—a category that the organization has defined wherein artists and artworks intervene in the electromagnetic spectrum as a creative medium. In this essay, Andy Stuhl reflects on Wave Farm’s 25-year history from two vantage points: as a researcher of recent American radio history in which Wave Farm has played an active role, and also as the 2021–22 Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellow. The Radio Artist Fellowship is a recent initiative by Wave Farm that has increased the organization’s role in archiving an artistic genre that previously lacked institutional support in the United States, and it has brought Wave Farm into greater contact with scholarly radio studies. Moving through the various phases of the nine-month fellowship, the essay pans out to show how radio studies, Wave Farm, and the radio medium as a whole have undergone significant and interconnected changes over the past 25 years.